Research Question: How and why should teachers see an increase in planning and collaboration time?
Author: Melissa Morris
RESEARCH
Source: Davis, J. (2015). Give Teachers Time to Collaborate. Education Week, 35(4), 26–27.
Summary: In this article, Jennifer Davis points out that teacher collaboration time is one of the biggest factors that leads to student success, and she says that the only way for teachers to have enough time to collaborate is through expanded school day schedules. By giving teachers time to collaborate, they can, “share instructional strategies, analyze lesson objectives, and compare student work.” But Davis points out that teacher collaboration time has not been a priority. She writes: “Despite both anecdotal and concrete evidence that giving teachers more time for dedicated, regular collaboration and learning opportunities can lead to higher student achievement, in most schools they engage in very little of it.” During this, “unusual moment in the history of education reform,” when teachers are being held to higher expectations and students standards are increasing, Davis hopes that teacher collaboration development time will increase as well.
Reaction: This article introduced me to the idea that a longer school day is the only way teacher collaboration will be successful. I find this idea interesting because Rhode Island does not have very many schools with an extended school day. In Massachusetts (the state this article centers around) the average school day is 6.45 hours, whereas in Rhode Island, the average school day is only 6.27 hours (US Department of Education). Although this daily time difference may be small, it adds up. Per week, Massachusetts teachers have over an hour more time in school than Rhode Island teachers, which means they have plenty of time to collaborate and help students, and each other, succeed.
Additional Sources: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), "Public School Data File," 2007-08.
Source: Mosle, S. (2014). Building Better Teachers - Mastering the Craft Demands Time to Collaborate. Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice.
Summary: This article opens with an introduction to one of education’s biggest problems: teacher retention. To understand one possible solution, Sara Mosle shares Elizabeth Green’s views on education by summarizing her book, Building a Better Teacher. In her book, Green promotes the idea that, “teaching is not some mystical talent but a set of best practices that can be codified and learned through extensive hands-on coaching, self-scrutiny, and collaboration.” She shares case studies of Deborah Ball and Doug Lemov, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the Japanese idea of jugyokenkyu, or “lesson study,” where new teachers learn through extensive apprenticeship, observing and being observed by more experienced teachers, and having discussions on the effectiveness of their teaching. Green “[salutes] Ball and Japan for getting the balance between classroom discipline and student engagement right,” but criticizes its margin to succeed in the US. She describes how the implementation of a lesson study approach would just increase teacher workload to an unbearable point. Teachers in the US are already in the classroom for twice as long as most other teachers around the world, which could be a major reason why they leave after only a few years. Mosle ends the article with call for collaboration. “The people who spend hours with our children in the classroom also need what they currently don’t get: the hours with peers and mentors that are essential to improving their craft.”
Reaction: This article made a connection for me between teacher retention and teacher collaboration. While the idea of teacher collaboration and jugyokenkyu is fantastic, the way that most US school days are scheduled does not allow for time during school for teachers to work together. This means that teachers who want to collaborate and learn from other teachers have a bigger workload outside of school, and usually cannot handle all of it, quitting after only a few years. In the first article, Jennifer Davis provides extending the school day as a possible solution. However, in this article, Sara Mosle discusses the idea of evaluating teacher training: why are teachers left to sink or swim? This fosters the idea that teachers are on their own, and further discourages collaboration.
Source: Schulten, K. (2011). Teachers Teaching Teachers, on Twitter: A and A on “EdChats.” The New York Times.
Summary: In this article, Katherine Schulten explores the new way Twitter is being used by educators around the globe through an interview with Thomas Whitby, Shelly Terrell, Greg Kulowiec and Meenoo Rami. Thomas Whitby and Shelly Terrell are the co-founders of #EdChat, a hashtag they invented on Twitter that teachers can use to share “links, resources, lesson plans, examples of projects and student work.” (Kulowiec) The purpose of #EdChat was to create a space where teachers could collaborate in the same place at the same time online, like a scheduled group chat. There are hundreds of different hashtags that have grown out of #EdChat… for instance, #SSChat is used by social studies teachers, and #EngChat is used by English teachers. When asked about the impact of the #EdChat, Kulowiec stated, “Teacher collaboration through social media tools is transforming the way teachers find, develop and use content in their classes,” and Whitby added that, “it exposes educators to a larger frame of reference in the world of education.” By sharing different resources and ideas, teachers can be inspired, find guidance in unfamiliar educational terrain, and can collaborate on teaching current events in the classroom by putting together new material quickly. In the future, the group plans on hosting 24-hour #EdChat marathons and face-to-face conferences for dedicated users.
Reaction: This article was interesting because I would never have thought about using Twitter as a teacher resource. I think it is a fantastic way to share resources, get inspired, and find support. Although I still believe that teachers need time during the school day to meet with each other, the more ways teachers can connect, the better. Through this tool, teachers can talk with educators from around the world, and get a more global view on education techniques. Something this article challenges is the idea that teachers should just be using the textbooks given to them to teach curriculum. After exploring some posts with the #EdChat hashtags myself, a lot of the posts are curriculum-based - like ideas for talking about the terrorist events that occurred in Paris, and how to help students find themselves in this digital era. If teachers are going to be able to collaborate, I think it goes without saying that they need to also have the freedom to plan their own lessons, otherwise the collaboration will be in vain.
Source: Bassett, K. (2012). Roxana District, Teachers Battle Over Planning. The Telegraph.
Summary: Kathie Bassett begins this article with the following sentence: “Sustained disagreement over the use of teacher planning time has forced the Roxana School district and its teachers union to seek federal arbitration to resolve their dispute.” The cause of the disagreement is a lack of communication between the district and its teachers. In August of 2011, the district introduced ‘Professional Learning Teams’ that required teachers to “use 30 minutes per week of their existing planning time to meet in a small group to work collaboratively.” For the meetings, a team leader must be elected and notes have to be taken and put in a binder, where they can be submitted for review. Jennifer Trask is the Roxana Education Association President, and she believes in the cause for this new mandate, but is frustrated that teachers didn’t have a say in how their time is to be managed. She states, “Our biggest feeling is frustration is that there’s just thing after thing after thing handed down (by the administration), and we don’t feel appreciated for what we are doing.” Teachers are upset because they do not have enough planning time as is, so as a compromise, they asked to work collaboratively for an hour every other week instead of a half hour every week, but were denied. Superintendent Deb Kreutztrager says that the collaboration is necessary in order to “address the Common Core standards,” and hopes the dispute will be resolved quickly so that the students can stay the center of attention.
Reaction: Unions!! This article is just one example of why teachers need more of a say in terms of their jobs. Like in the last article, if teachers aren’t allowed to plan and manage their own time, they will feel like the administration is just handing down more and more rules and changes without truly seeing the effects. In schools that have teacher unions, teachers have some leverage to get what they want, but in schools that don’t, teachers are left with no way to fight “the larger powers that be” and either have to accept the new mandates or leave. I still find the idea of teacher unions interesting, because if teachers were allowed to have more of a voice in terms of education, I don’t think there would be a need for unions, and the legal mess that often accompanies them.
Source: Jao, L., & McDougall, D. (2015). The Collaborative Teacher Inquiry Project: A Purposeful Professional Development Initiave. Canadian Journal of Education, 38(1), 1–22.
Summary: The Collaborative Teacher Inquiry Project was a “professional development initiative that brought together educators from nine schools across four neighboring school districts in Ontario seeking to improve their Grade 9 Applied Mathematics program.” The study included workshops about improving school performance based on goals, and allowed teachers to collaborate with each other to come up with creative and feasible solutions. The problem was that students were struggling with the transition from 8th grade to 9th grade math, and one-day professional development sessions were not working. The solution seemed to be in collaboration of different kinds: learning communities, co-teaching, and peer coaching. Data for the experiment was collected from written reflections. Teachers found themselves more motivated to go back to teaching after the project because they had plenty of new ideas to work with thanks to the collaboration.
Reaction: One thing that struck me from this study was that some teachers involved in the project reported that collaboration, co-teaching and peer coaching was all new to them, and that they appreciated the time allotted to work with one another. Collaboration is essential in that it allows for a strong flow of ideas to be spread, evaluated and bettered. In this way, teachers don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time they want to teach something differently. I think this type of project gives communities of schools a glimpse of what could be: a scenario where sharing materials, providing teaching feedback and supporting one another is frequent and effective. It doesn’t surprise me that math is one of the last fields to be seeing this kind of collaborative approach, because math is often thought of as a “straightforward” subject that can be most efficiently taught using a textbook. A lot of the reason why the Common Core standards have been receiving backlash is because they redefine what it means to teach math, and students, parents, and most importantly, teachers, were not ready for the switch. Personally I believe it is an essential change of mindset to look at math more conceptually, because I find that math becomes more understandable when looked at a different way.
Overall Reaction to Your Research
If anything, my research on teacher planning and collaboration time has shown me the importance of understanding school as a dynamic system. In everyday life, we look at our environments as ecosystems, with strong connections and cause-and-effect loops: everything is tied together. Schools are the same; in this sense, there is no 'easy' way to fix the lack of collaboration between teachers and departments. Should the school day be longer? Should teachers just teach for a smaller amount of time? Can administration dictate what teachers use that time for? The only definitive conclusion I can come to is that teacher planning and collaboration time in US schools needs to increase, especially for new teachers, if we want to raise the level of education in our country.
How does this research help us identify or refine a strategy to improve schools in Rhode Island?
This research shows that without planning and collaboration time, teachers will become burned out very quickly, and we will continue to see a decline of teachers in the future. In Rhode Island, schools should take a serious look at the structure of their school day and ask, "Why is this schedule the way it is?" Too often scheduling gets overlooked, because it hasn't changed in decades. Maybe Rhode Island needs to move away from the factory-like schedule of a typical school day and think outside the box. And the change can not come from solely the administration - the teachers need to have a say in the scheduling as well; their input should be the most valued during the revamping process. One possible solution would be to hold projects over the summer like in the last article posted above, to open teachers' and administrators' eyes to the advantages of collaboration.
Research Question: How and why should teachers see an increase in planning and collaboration time?
Author: Melissa Morris
RESEARCH
Source: Davis, J. (2015). Give Teachers Time to Collaborate. Education Week, 35(4), 26–27.
Summary:
In this article, Jennifer Davis points out that teacher collaboration time is one of the biggest factors that leads to student success, and she says that the only way for teachers to have enough time to collaborate is through expanded school day schedules. By giving teachers time to collaborate, they can, “share instructional strategies, analyze lesson objectives, and compare student work.” But Davis points out that teacher collaboration time has not been a priority. She writes: “Despite both anecdotal and concrete evidence that giving teachers more time for dedicated, regular collaboration and learning opportunities can lead to higher student achievement, in most schools they engage in very little of it.” During this, “unusual moment in the history of education reform,” when teachers are being held to higher expectations and students standards are increasing, Davis hopes that teacher collaboration development time will increase as well.
Reaction:
This article introduced me to the idea that a longer school day is the only way teacher collaboration will be successful. I find this idea interesting because Rhode Island does not have very many schools with an extended school day. In Massachusetts (the state this article centers around) the average school day is 6.45 hours, whereas in Rhode Island, the average school day is only 6.27 hours (US Department of Education). Although this daily time difference may be small, it adds up. Per week, Massachusetts teachers have over an hour more time in school than Rhode Island teachers, which means they have plenty of time to collaborate and help students, and each other, succeed.
Additional Sources:
US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), "Public School Data File," 2007-08.
Source: Mosle, S. (2014). Building Better Teachers - Mastering the Craft Demands Time to Collaborate. Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice.
Summary:
This article opens with an introduction to one of education’s biggest problems: teacher retention. To understand one possible solution, Sara Mosle shares Elizabeth Green’s views on education by summarizing her book, Building a Better Teacher. In her book, Green promotes the idea that, “teaching is not some mystical talent but a set of best practices that can be codified and learned through extensive hands-on coaching, self-scrutiny, and collaboration.” She shares case studies of Deborah Ball and Doug Lemov, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the Japanese idea of jugyokenkyu, or “lesson study,” where new teachers learn through extensive apprenticeship, observing and being observed by more experienced teachers, and having discussions on the effectiveness of their teaching. Green “[salutes] Ball and Japan for getting the balance between classroom discipline and student engagement right,” but criticizes its margin to succeed in the US. She describes how the implementation of a lesson study approach would just increase teacher workload to an unbearable point. Teachers in the US are already in the classroom for twice as long as most other teachers around the world, which could be a major reason why they leave after only a few years. Mosle ends the article with call for collaboration. “The people who spend hours with our children in the classroom also need what they currently don’t get: the hours with peers and mentors that are essential to improving their craft.”
Reaction:
This article made a connection for me between teacher retention and teacher collaboration. While the idea of teacher collaboration and jugyokenkyu is fantastic, the way that most US school days are scheduled does not allow for time during school for teachers to work together. This means that teachers who want to collaborate and learn from other teachers have a bigger workload outside of school, and usually cannot handle all of it, quitting after only a few years. In the first article, Jennifer Davis provides extending the school day as a possible solution. However, in this article, Sara Mosle discusses the idea of evaluating teacher training: why are teachers left to sink or swim? This fosters the idea that teachers are on their own, and further discourages collaboration.
Source: Schulten, K. (2011). Teachers Teaching Teachers, on Twitter: A and A on “EdChats.” The New York Times.
Summary:
In this article, Katherine Schulten explores the new way Twitter is being used by educators around the globe through an interview with Thomas Whitby, Shelly Terrell, Greg Kulowiec and Meenoo Rami. Thomas Whitby and Shelly Terrell are the co-founders of #EdChat, a hashtag they invented on Twitter that teachers can use to share “links, resources, lesson plans, examples of projects and student work.” (Kulowiec) The purpose of #EdChat was to create a space where teachers could collaborate in the same place at the same time online, like a scheduled group chat. There are hundreds of different hashtags that have grown out of #EdChat… for instance, #SSChat is used by social studies teachers, and #EngChat is used by English teachers. When asked about the impact of the #EdChat, Kulowiec stated, “Teacher collaboration through social media tools is transforming the way teachers find, develop and use content in their classes,” and Whitby added that, “it exposes educators to a larger frame of reference in the world of education.” By sharing different resources and ideas, teachers can be inspired, find guidance in unfamiliar educational terrain, and can collaborate on teaching current events in the classroom by putting together new material quickly. In the future, the group plans on hosting 24-hour #EdChat marathons and face-to-face conferences for dedicated users.
Reaction:
This article was interesting because I would never have thought about using Twitter as a teacher resource. I think it is a fantastic way to share resources, get inspired, and find support. Although I still believe that teachers need time during the school day to meet with each other, the more ways teachers can connect, the better. Through this tool, teachers can talk with educators from around the world, and get a more global view on education techniques. Something this article challenges is the idea that teachers should just be using the textbooks given to them to teach curriculum. After exploring some posts with the #EdChat hashtags myself, a lot of the posts are curriculum-based - like ideas for talking about the terrorist events that occurred in Paris, and how to help students find themselves in this digital era. If teachers are going to be able to collaborate, I think it goes without saying that they need to also have the freedom to plan their own lessons, otherwise the collaboration will be in vain.
Source: Bassett, K. (2012). Roxana District, Teachers Battle Over Planning. The Telegraph.
Summary:
Kathie Bassett begins this article with the following sentence: “Sustained disagreement over the use of teacher planning time has forced the Roxana School district and its teachers union to seek federal arbitration to resolve their dispute.” The cause of the disagreement is a lack of communication between the district and its teachers. In August of 2011, the district introduced ‘Professional Learning Teams’ that required teachers to “use 30 minutes per week of their existing planning time to meet in a small group to work collaboratively.” For the meetings, a team leader must be elected and notes have to be taken and put in a binder, where they can be submitted for review. Jennifer Trask is the Roxana Education Association President, and she believes in the cause for this new mandate, but is frustrated that teachers didn’t have a say in how their time is to be managed. She states, “Our biggest feeling is frustration is that there’s just thing after thing after thing handed down (by the administration), and we don’t feel appreciated for what we are doing.” Teachers are upset because they do not have enough planning time as is, so as a compromise, they asked to work collaboratively for an hour every other week instead of a half hour every week, but were denied. Superintendent Deb Kreutztrager says that the collaboration is necessary in order to “address the Common Core standards,” and hopes the dispute will be resolved quickly so that the students can stay the center of attention.
Reaction:
Unions!! This article is just one example of why teachers need more of a say in terms of their jobs. Like in the last article, if teachers aren’t allowed to plan and manage their own time, they will feel like the administration is just handing down more and more rules and changes without truly seeing the effects. In schools that have teacher unions, teachers have some leverage to get what they want, but in schools that don’t, teachers are left with no way to fight “the larger powers that be” and either have to accept the new mandates or leave. I still find the idea of teacher unions interesting, because if teachers were allowed to have more of a voice in terms of education, I don’t think there would be a need for unions, and the legal mess that often accompanies them.
Source: Jao, L., & McDougall, D. (2015). The Collaborative Teacher Inquiry Project: A Purposeful Professional Development Initiave. Canadian Journal of Education, 38(1), 1–22.
Summary:
The Collaborative Teacher Inquiry Project was a “professional development initiative that brought together educators from nine schools across four neighboring school districts in Ontario seeking to improve their Grade 9 Applied Mathematics program.” The study included workshops about improving school performance based on goals, and allowed teachers to collaborate with each other to come up with creative and feasible solutions. The problem was that students were struggling with the transition from 8th grade to 9th grade math, and one-day professional development sessions were not working. The solution seemed to be in collaboration of different kinds: learning communities, co-teaching, and peer coaching. Data for the experiment was collected from written reflections. Teachers found themselves more motivated to go back to teaching after the project because they had plenty of new ideas to work with thanks to the collaboration.
Reaction:
One thing that struck me from this study was that some teachers involved in the project reported that collaboration, co-teaching and peer coaching was all new to them, and that they appreciated the time allotted to work with one another. Collaboration is essential in that it allows for a strong flow of ideas to be spread, evaluated and bettered. In this way, teachers don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time they want to teach something differently. I think this type of project gives communities of schools a glimpse of what could be: a scenario where sharing materials, providing teaching feedback and supporting one another is frequent and effective. It doesn’t surprise me that math is one of the last fields to be seeing this kind of collaborative approach, because math is often thought of as a “straightforward” subject that can be most efficiently taught using a textbook. A lot of the reason why the Common Core standards have been receiving backlash is because they redefine what it means to teach math, and students, parents, and most importantly, teachers, were not ready for the switch. Personally I believe it is an essential change of mindset to look at math more conceptually, because I find that math becomes more understandable when looked at a different way.
Overall Reaction to Your Research
If anything, my research on teacher planning and collaboration time has shown me the importance of understanding school as a dynamic system. In everyday life, we look at our environments as ecosystems, with strong connections and cause-and-effect loops: everything is tied together. Schools are the same; in this sense, there is no 'easy' way to fix the lack of collaboration between teachers and departments. Should the school day be longer? Should teachers just teach for a smaller amount of time? Can administration dictate what teachers use that time for? The only definitive conclusion I can come to is that teacher planning and collaboration time in US schools needs to increase, especially for new teachers, if we want to raise the level of education in our country.
How does this research help us identify or refine a strategy to improve schools in Rhode Island?
This research shows that without planning and collaboration time, teachers will become burned out very quickly, and we will continue to see a decline of teachers in the future. In Rhode Island, schools should take a serious look at the structure of their school day and ask, "Why is this schedule the way it is?" Too often scheduling gets overlooked, because it hasn't changed in decades. Maybe Rhode Island needs to move away from the factory-like schedule of a typical school day and think outside the box. And the change can not come from solely the administration - the teachers need to have a say in the scheduling as well; their input should be the most valued during the revamping process. One possible solution would be to hold projects over the summer like in the last article posted above, to open teachers' and administrators' eyes to the advantages of collaboration.